Finding new ways to motivate

According to a recent study, poor lifestyle choices made by employees cost British companies around £58 billion a year in lost productivity. That’s huge! But how can you get people to change behaviour patterns and begin to make healthier choices? It’s a difficult challenge – and just the sort of problem we relish.

Offering incentives

Incentives are proven to engage people. A Rand Europe study showed that incentivising healthy behaviour could increase participation in a programme by more than 10%. We looked at this study alongside others and decided to trial a range of different incentives in our test platform.

Getting everyone involved

At Tictrac everyone is involved in user research and testing – including designers, product managers, developers and account managers. That way we all understand our users and make sure we keep them at the heart of everything we do.

When faced with a new challenge, such as finding out how best to incentivise our users, we start by outlining our goals and what we hope to learn. In this case we began with the following:

Will our users be able to find the rewards easily?

Will they understand the new feature?

What should we reward people for?

What type of reward should we give them?

What’s the lowest value incentive that changes behaviour?

How can we encourage users to do the things that earn them reward points?

Each round of testing taught us more about our users but also raised new issues. As we came up with solutions, new problems arose and we had to consider them too. Here’s an example:

Surprising outcomes

Sometimes the results surprise us. In this experiment, we learned that users didn’t want things like free coffee because they saw this as unhealthy. It didn’t fit our product. Instead, our users wanted to have discounts on fitness trackers, sportswear, gym membership and healthy food.

Looking at the feedback we received, we changed the design, reward types and points scheme. Finally, after four rounds of testing, we finished the updates and developed the rewards system that’s available on our live platform now.

Our real-life users weren’t inconvenienced by poor planning or ill thought out changes. Instead, thanks to our extensive research, they were able to benefit straight away from a rewards scheme we knew would appeal to their needs and motivations.

Get involved

If you’d like to be involved in testing upcoming product features, we’d love to hear from you. Please share your contact details here and we’ll be in touch.

Want to get involved?

If you want to contribute to our research or share your own, we’d love to hear from you.